IN A FREE STATE (1971)

This volume appears to be another innovation in Naipaul's corpus of works, not only because it simultaneously incorporates fiction and non-fiction, but also because the title novella is his first work of fiction with an African setting. The chronological contingency of the publications of The Loss of El Dorado and In a Free State also crudely suggests that there is a linkage between Naipaul's inability, or choice not, to write the history of Trinidad as other than a European one, and his African story's concentration on the besieged and outgoing European expatriate protagonists in a newly independent African nation. Furthermore, it would appear to be a logical progression for Naipaul to now explore the continent of Africa, for it represents the last major world player in colonialism's history, the topic that by this stage in his career seems to overwhelm the local and situated investigations that his personal history had hitherto supplied him. Not surprisingly, therefore, Naipaul's first foray beyond the boundaries of the places that constitute his personal history also carry an historical rather than personal connection since the continent qualifies as a vital referent in the history of the Caribbean.

In a Free State presents itself as a confident but elusive series of narratives that demonstrate the lambent spread of their collective global span. The “Prologue” and “Epilogue” are the non-fictional bookends, and each is set within a “safe” corner of the continent, Egypt. The first story, “One Out of Many,” traces the migration of an Indian foreign-service official's servant, Santosh, from Bombay to Washington D.C., and the second, “Tell Me Who to Kill,” is an internal monologue of an immigrant from the Caribbean who becomes insane in his quest to protect his brother's passage to and settlement in Britain. Taken together with some of the short stories of A Flag on the Island, they begin to form their own independent corpus of “immigrant” stories which, more than twenty years later, in The Enigma of Arrival (1987), Naipaul claims to have missed as a proper subject for his attention (The Enigma of Arrival, p. 141). At the time of its publication, however, In a Free State's geographical sweep signaled more a sense of the author's expanded purview than a thematic consolidation of post-Second World War migratory patterns from the Third World to the First.

The most frequently discussed aspect of the book is its treatment of the themes of “freedom” and “alienation” which Naipaul treats with a many-layered irony.¹ On a simple level, the stories all allow Naipaul to expose the absence of freedom by demystifying the myths surrounding misperceptions that one must be elsewhere to be “free.” By establishing situations which involve what used to be called “culture-clashes,” Naipaul is able to pinpoint the moments of transference that occur from one form of entrapment to another when his characters make their choices. To compound his new thesis about postcolonial upheaval and rootlessness, Naipaul also charts the role that deracination plays in making the fate of each of the social actors or characters appear so irrevocable: Santosh, Dayo's brother, Bobby, Linda, the Tramp, even the narrator of the “Prologue” and “Epilogue” are each circumscribed by their own choices or actions. Their subsequent despair only surfaces when a self-knowledge reveals itself after they find themselves still entrapped, or entrapped again. This layering of despair and entrapment has been read as an example of a postcolonial generation's existentialist crisis and indeed it is; but while Naipaul is careful to show that part of its origin is the result of misplaced and sometimes misled desire, his acuity in explaining the metropolitan-centered development of colonial identity-formations still cannot wrest itself from an historical determinism.

In the first story, “One Out of Many,” Santosh's first-person account, for example, opens with a statement cast in the future perfect tense, and then immediately undermines its potential mythic proportions: “I am now an American citizen and live in Washington, capital of the world. Many people, both here and in India, will feel that I have done well. But” (In a Free State, p. 21). His subsequent reconstruction of his passage from the streets of Bombay to his employer's closet, and finally to his marriage to an African-American cleaning woman and his life as a cook typically insists upon a class equivalence for the immigrant experience. Santosh's recollections necessarily follow a course of self-awareness as Naipaul allows him a progressive series of recognitions, first of the conditions of his existence, and then of himself. When, in the middle of the story, Santosh tries to make sense of the cleaning woman's interest in him, he peers into a mirror and, “Slowly I made a discovery. My face was handsome. I had never thought of myself in this way. I had thought of myself as unnoticeable, with features that served as identification alone” (In a Free State, p. 35). This delayed “mirror phase” that Santosh suddenly has to negotiate at first appears ironic, cutting as it does into the narcissistic moment that supposedly heralds an individualism necessary for “westernization.” From the point of view of the narrator's self-consciousness, however, this graduation from subservience to “freedom” is less a Naipaulian moment of “self-knowledge” than an attempt to chart the blindness that Naipaul feels characterizes a subcontinental state of mind.²

Similarly, in “Tell Me Who to Kill,” the narrator's dementia is designed to illustrate the pathological side of the migratory process, one where a sense of self is lost rather than gained. We soon learn that the narrator is a madman, and that he is Dayo's brother, all direct references to himself being repressed into a third-person address. The actual events that punctuate the protagonist's life are hazy indicators of the obsessive paternalistic concern with his brother's life that develops into the insanity we watch unfold. We learn that the narrator's feelings of having been betrayed, and his subsequent need to find something or somebody to kill, stem from his brother's successful assimilation which has necessitated the narrator's massive disjunction from a sense of his responsibility. By supplying Dayo with a sense of continuity, he has lost his own. The story's dark irony is that Dayo's tale corresponds to the norm of the theme of migration, and that the narrator's casualty is the sacrifice migration often entails. Both “One Out of Many” and “Tell Me Who to Kill” explore loss and alienation as the impoverished consequence of having subscribed incorrectly, or carelessly, to an ultimately skewed sense of historical opportunity.

“In a Free State” is a more concentrated study of yet another related postcolonial migratory trajectory. Rather than centralized protagonists representing alternative options in a world no longer bound by a tightly controlling metropole, Bobby, the mildly idealistic British expatriate expert, and Linda, a disaffected British expatriate wife, represent instead the attitudinal chaos unleashed within the colonialist mentality as it tries to deal with the first stages of decolonization. The other, differently ominous, player in the story is the newly emerging African nation which Naipaul casts in a menacing and heavily symbolic landscape. Finally, in one of his first and most studied explorations of homosexuality as the sexual trope most suited to exemplify a “liberal” colonial paternalism, Naipaul is able to block the action of Bobby's frustrated sexual pursuits of African men as a corollary of the earnest but equally ill-targeted professions of intimacy of a “common wealth.”

By choosing to explore an expatriate mentality, Naipaul focuses on a source material most available to a literary endeavor which has schooled itself in the already articulated utterances of developing colonialist perceptions. From the observations of a Froude to the more studied examinations of a Kipling or a Conrad, the habits of an imperial gaze are filtered through the narrower visors of a post-settler perspective that still carries the traces of paranoia about Africa's “evolution.” The closed and clichéd conversation between Bobby and Linda as they drive from the capital to their compound in the Southern Collectorate, and which makes up the bulk of the novella, is Naipaul's first sustained protracted fictional dialogue, the course of which allows his characters to voice almost every received assumption ever developed within the lexicon of British colonial Africa. The anchor that the idea of South Africa provides Linda, for example, is an acutely replicated moment of an internal colonial register which, in the African context, has always allowed the oddest apologia to white settlers looking for a legislated haven and escape. Naipaul fully compromises Bobby's more idealistic and apparently humanistic stand by casting him as a homosexual first and an administrator second, and then by rewarding his individual commitment with the arbitrary and ineluctable violence of a military checkpoint, where soldiers brutally beat him for no apparent reason.

Despite the novella's emphasis upon Bobby and Linda, the story's sharpest impact remains the menace written into the “tribal” politics being played out within the newly independent African state. Never named, the country is obviously a composite of Uganda and Kenya, which is to become, with Rwanda, Burundi, and Zaire, the even more seamless starting point and setting of Naipaul's more sophisticated “African” work, A Bend in the River (1979). But where Naipaul creates distinct nations through which his protagonist travels in A Bend in the River, his unnamed nation in “In a Free State,” is deliberately charted as an amorphous political space. Naipaul's attempt is to create a political atmosphere charged with all the turmoil and volatility associated with the transfer of power at the advent of decolonization. In doing so, however, he condenses the events of several different histories with the result that his new African nation is unnecessarily overdetermined. For example, even though “In a Free State” was written after the overthrow of the Kabaka, and then Milton Obote in Uganda, but before Idi Amin's massive expulsion of Asians in 1972, Naipaul also grafts the ripe memories of Kenya's history of its Land and Freedom Army's campaigns, the so-called Mau Mau emergency of the 1950s, as well as the 1964 revolution in Zanzibar, and the first stages of “Africanization” in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania in the late 1960s. While this tactic may draw upon a rich harvest of post-independence conflicts, its conflation within a single nation is a dubious basis for Naipaul's thesis about Africa's and Africans' preparedness for “independence.” The exercise of state power, therefore, is presented as raw and arbitrary, even while aided by American and British strategic interests. Thus, Bobby and Linda's drive through the Great Rift Valley, periodically dotted with blackface advertisements, runs parallel with the president's helicopter searching for the hiding king; their stops, at checkpoints and for refreshments at formerly white-only safari lodges and an isolated home of an Asian family, are episodes that conspire to present a picture of a fragmented and torn social order. The tenor of impending apocalypse, which will be more fully realized in A Bend in the River, is finally articulated when Bobby is brutally beaten at the last checkpoint. Nowhere does the story suggest a deeper awareness of the political complexities and economic handicaps created by Africa's colonization. Instead, the portraits of Africans, filtered through the blinkered and distorting colonialist gazes of the non-African characters, are like Natural History Museum displays of evolving “Man.”³

The “Epilogue” and “Prologue” of the volume constitute the documentary brackets that allow Naipaul to present his stories' fictional rendering of postcolonial “chaos” within the frame of his travelogue persona. The narrator's self-appointed status as strict observer rather than participant of events during his sea approach to the continent foreshadows the study of aggression that is undertaken in varying degrees within each of the volume's stories. In the “Prologue,” one of the passengers on board, the Tramp, is ridiculed cruelly by the others, a circumstance the narrator watches, but does not attempt to interfere with. The Tramp eventually retaliates so that the episode narrated manages to reconcile itself without the narrator, as fellow passenger, having to step in. By the time of the “Epilogue,” however, when witness to a more diffuse but no less virulent scene of naked attitudinal posturing of tourists in Egypt, where they bait local lads by throwing food at them, the narrator's intervention as he tries to stop the hotel staff from whipping the boys is a sudden and dramatic gesture:

I felt exposed, futile, and wanted only to be back at my table. When I got back I took up my sandwich. It had happened quickly; there had been no disturbance. The Germans stared at me. But I was indifferent to them now as I was indifferent to the Italian in the cerise jersey … he was ostentatiously shaking out lunch boxes and sandwich wrappers onto the sand.

The children remained where they were. The man from whom I had taken the whip came to give me coffee and to plead again in Arabic and English. The coffee was free; it was his gift to me. But even while he was talking the children had begun to come closer. Soon they would be back, raking the sand for what they had seen the Italian throw out. (In a Free State, p. 244)

The almost immediate erasure of the narrator's intervention becomes a parable of despair and can be read, coming as it does at the end of the volume, as the event that solidifies Naipaul's pact of an existentialist disassociation from the testimony he writes. This disassociation remains a feature of all his subsequent narratives, be they fiction or non-fiction, despite the recent tempering of his singular gaze upon a now older postcolonial world.

The ideological basis for this disassociation, a modulation of his agenda of writing as separation, seems to be the belief that in order to chronicle events that in their sum accumulate into historical movements, the story-teller cannot participate or intervene for to do so is to lose the ignorance of a “stranger's eye.” Only with it, Naipaul suggests as part of his conclusion, can the writer approach “the only pure time, at the beginning, when the ancient artist, knowing no other land, had learned to look at his own and had seen it as complete … Perhaps that vision of the land, in which the Nile was only water, a blue-green chevron, had always been a fabrication, a cause for yearning, something for the tomb” (In a Free State, p. 246). Thus the volume ends with a horrified contemplation of what the narrator feels the fabrication of postcolonial history entails, and further suggests that any attempt to represent this process can only take place after a massive repression of context, that which allowed the “ancient artist” to observe his world and to see it as “complete.”

Notes

1. See Angus Calder, “Darkest Naipaulia,” New Statesman 82 (October 8, 1971): 482-83; and Francis Wyndham, “V. S. Naipaul,” The Listener 86 (October 7, 1971): 461-62, for early reviews. Also see Nan Doerksen, “‘In a Free State’ and ‘Nausea,’” World Literature Written in English 20 (Spring 1981): 105-13, and Andrew Gurr, “The Freedom of Exile in Naipaul and Doris Lessing,” Ariel 13 (October 1982): 7-18.

2. It is also worth noting that Santosh's “self-awareness” arises out of his acknowledgment of an Indian form of racial discrimination where to be “black,” a hubshi, is tantamount to being subhuman. The grafting that Naipaul practices between different kinds of racism and prejudicial attitudes obscures rather than reveals their disparate origins.

3. For a chilling exercise in exploring the relationship between the views about Africans projected through the narrative voice, the principal characters, and those of Naipaul in the era of “In a Free State,” Paul Theroux's tribute to Naipaul, “V.S. Naipaul,” Modern Fiction Studies, 30 (Autumn 1984): 445-55 should be consulted.